Intrinsic and Extrinsic Predictors of Emotion Regulation in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Rachel M Fenning, Jason K Baker, Jacquelyn Moffitt
PMID 29926292WHAT IT FOUND
Children with autism showed more emotional dysregulation when alone than with a parent.
Higher autism symptom levels were linked with more dysregulation in both situations. Better parent support was linked with less dysregulation only while the parent helped.
Key findings
01Children showed more observed emotion dysregulation when working alone than when working with a parent.
02More severe ASD symptoms were linked with more observed emotion dysregulation in both the alone and parent-child tasks.
03In the parent-child task, more severe ASD symptoms, younger age, and lower quality parental scaffolding were associated with more dysregulation.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
Only 46 children were recruited and 43 were analysed, so the findings may not apply broadly. The study measured children once and did not test whether changing parent support changes regulation. The parent-child task came before the alone task and task order was not counterbalanced, so the alone task could have been affected by earlier frustration. Parent scaffolding and child dysregulation were coded from the same parent-child task, which may inflate their association. One family left before IQ and ASD testing, and two children were excluded because they did not understand the alone task. Children with IQ below 40 or motor impairment that prevented walking were excluded. The study used a relatively new skin conductance metric, so its null result for physiological reactivity may reflect measurement.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflict of interest. The supplied text does not state a funding source.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the link between parent scaffolding and less dysregulation as evidence that training parents to scaffold will improve a child's regulation. This was an observational study, the tasks were not randomised, and scaffolding and dysregulation were coded from the same parent-child task.